Last week I was at the Enhance Media Conference. There were over 400 delegates which was a superb turnout. If you missed it you can view the speakers here.
Some key stats from the speakers:
Jobg8 (online marketplace for jobs): there are over 5,000 job boards in the UK and over 50,000 in the US.
Madgex (job board and CV search and match software): over 75% of job seekers expect to find their next job from job boards (Weddle’s 2009 Source of Employment Survey) and 79% of employers use social media sites - IAEWS 2009)
LinkedIn: Surveyed 262 HR professionals and found that 25% hire from job boards. 50% plan to spend less time and money on using third party agencies and 40% plan to spend less on job boards. When asked what the plan to spend more time and money on 37% said internal referral programmes and 30% said professional and social networks. 68% said they thought professional and social networks was the most essential and long last trend in recruiting.
Enhance Media: Giles's presentation was very interesting and jam packed with stats - but this wasn't on the memory disk we were given and despite requests hasn't been made available to me!
Lawspeed (recruitment law specialists): 53% of employers use social networking sites to "screen" candidates and 12% plan to do so. The TUC said Facebook was "3.5million HR accidents waiting to happen”. The bottom line of this presentation was that if you are using social networking sites to screen candidates you must follow data protection laws. It's not illegal but there are guidelines and if you use information on the sites you are potentially open to a discrimination case. If you want to monitor employees social networking usage that's fine as long as you put the details in their contract of employment.
Capita (outsourcing company): These were Steve Newson's predictions for 2010:
•Challenging year ahead with some acute difficulties in the public sector
•Candidate sourcing strategies will continue to broaden
•Social Recruiting will grow
•Mobile Phone Applications will have an important place
•Job Boards will innovate or see declining share
•In the broadest sense of the word, "Search" will be a key factor
•Finding the model that enables interaction with emerging technologies will be important to the health of core recruitment platforms
•Newspaper advertising model likely to fundamentally change
The final session was a panel debate with Google, Bing, Trinity Mirror and Monster. I personally didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped I might and didn't get as much benefit from it. However, I'm not sure it's very easy to get a panel session right (which worries me as I'm on two this year!)
There was also a twitter hashtag for the event of #emconf2010 - you can view this to see talk from the day. It's very clear that people are a lot more polite about conferences and speakers when they do it in public forum!
What did I take from the event? There is talk that job boards are dying (although there was very little evidence of this), some candidates are more savvy (localised searches, using less job boards, expecting more from agencies) but many are still at an entry level with regards to using the internet, corporates want to move away from using agencies (as they always have!). The most positive stuff didn't really come from the speakers but from the attitude of the delegates. There was a real buzz and lots of very up beat talk.
If you want to monitor employees social networking usage that's fine as long as you put the details in their contract of employment.
Posted by: Cheap Computers Canada | 18 March 2010 at 09:06 PM